The Best Alternate History Stories Of The Twentieth Century Part 10

"Somehow, I have to make up for that. All of us do. So I'm going to look for him. And if I... when I find him... so help me, I am going to beat the c.r.a.p out of him for scaring us this way!" She was sobbing noisily now, and when I held out my arms, she flung herself into them.

"Oh Daddy, I was wrong, it all went wrong and it got so f.u.c.ked up!"

"Don't use words like that," I whispered, kissing my girl's hair. "Not in front of your mother."

"It's all right," said Margaret. "I feel the same way."

"Unless I find him, Nguyen and the little boy are all we've got of Barry. And we're all they've got. But all you can do is call them bad words and... and..."

I patted her back and met my wife's eyes. She nodded, and I knew we'd be having guests in the house. No, scratch that. We'd be having new family members come to live here. And if my sister's husband even thought of opening his big fat mouth, I'd shut it for him the way I'd wanted to for the past thirty years.

Stephanie pulled out of my arms and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. I sighed and picked my words. If I said things wrong, I was scared I'd lose her.

"We've been in this town for five generations," I began slowly. "I think our family has enough of a reputation so people will welcome... what did you say her name was?"

"Nguyen," Margaret whispered. Her eyes were very bright. "I'll brush up on my French." She used to teach it before we got married. "And the little boy-our grandson-is Barry, Jr. I can't imagine how that sounds in a Vietnamese accent, can you?"

A tiny woman in those floaty things Vietnamese women wore. A little lady. My son's wife... or widow. And one of those cute little black-eyed kids, unless he looked like Bear. Family. Just let anyone dare say anything.

"We can put them in Barry's room," I stammered. "I suppose."

"Nguyen can have mine," said Steffie. "I won't need it. Oh, Daddy, I was wrong about so many things. But I was right about you after all."

She kissed me, then ran upstairs, a whirlwind in a flowered nightgown. I could hear closets and drawers protesting and paper ripping.

"I wish she'd been right about all of them," I told Margaret. She took my hand.

"I'm going with Stephanie to pick up... Nguyen," my wife informed me.

It would get easier, I sensed, for both of us to think of her and the boy as family once we met them. My son's wife. My son's son. This wasn't how I'd thought that would be.

In a few minutes, once the shock wore off, I supposed I'd get to see the pictures. I knew there had to be pictures. But you don't live with a woman for this many years without knowing when she has more to say. And having a pretty good idea of what it is-most of the time.

This time, though, my guess was right. "Joe, I want you to come with us to Was.h.i.+ngton so we can all meet as a family. Nguyen must be terrified. She's lost everything and, and everyone."

Her voice trembled, but she forced it to calm. "It would mean a lot to her. Steff says the Vietnamese are Confucian. If the head of our family were there to greet her, she'd know she was welcome, she and the little one."

A smile flickered across her face. "I wonder where we can get a crib," she mused. "All our friends' children are grown and haven't started having babies yet. We'll be the first to have a grandchild."

I bent over and hugged her. "Did you make a third plane reservation?"

She smiled at me. "What do you think?"

"I'll carry your suitcase downstairs for you, baby," I told my daughter.

"Oh, Dad, you know I'll have to lug my own stuff once I go overseas..."

"As long as you're in my house, young lady-"

"It's on my bed." I went into her room to get it. She'd taken a cheap plaid fabric thing, not one of the good, big Samsonite cases she'd gotten for high school graduation. Her room wasn't just clean: it was sterile. She'd even torn down her posters and hung the crewelwork back up. I wondered what this strange new daughter-in-law of mine would make of the pretty blue and lilac room.

My foot sent something spinning and rolling. I bent to retrieve the thing, which promptly jagged my finger. One of Stephanie's protest b.u.t.tons, hurled away as if in despair, poor girl. "Suppose they gave a war and n.o.body came?" it asked.

Suppose they did? It had never happened yet.

Suppose, instead, they gave a peace? That hadn't worked, either.

But I can always hope, can't I?

After all, I have a grandson to look out for.

LARRY NIVEN.

Larry Niven established his credentials as a provocative writer of hard science fiction with his Nebula Awardwinning novel Ringworld, about an artificial ring-shaped planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circ.u.mference that poses unusual technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants. The novel, and its sequels Ringworld Engineers and The Ringworld Throne, are part of Niven's vast Tales of Known s.p.a.ce saga, an acclaimed future history of interstellar s.p.a.ce that has accommodated a wide variety of themes including alien culture, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, teleportation, and exotic alien cultures in such novels as The World of Ptavvs and A Gift from Earth, and the short-fiction collections Neutron Star, The Shape of s.p.a.ce, and Tales of Known s.p.a.ce. Between 1988 and 1991 the series spun off a quartet of shared-world anthologies, The Man-Kzin Wars, concerned with human and extraterrestrial conflict. Niven's collaborations extend to novel-length works of fiction and include The Mote in G.o.d's Eye, Inferno, Oath of Fealty, and Lucifer's Hammer, all co-auth.o.r.ed with Jerry Pournelle, and the Dream Park series, written with Steve Barnes. Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive concepts of magic, including The Magic Goes Away and the collection Time of the Warlock. A representative sampling of his short fiction and nonfiction can be found in N-s.p.a.ce.

ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS.

Larry Niven

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn't understand the theory, though G.o.d knows he'd tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems.

Senseless suicides, senseless crimes. A city-wide epidemic. It had hit other cities too. Trimble suspected that it was worldwide, that other nations were simply keeping it quiet.

Trimble's sad eyes focused on the clock. Quitting time. He stood up to go home, and slowly sat down again. For he had his teeth in the problem, and he couldn't let go.

Not that he was really accomplis.h.i.+ng anything.

But if he left now, he'd only have to take it up again tomorrow.

Go, or stay?

And the branchings began again. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Some had left early. Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their mult.i.tudes, leaving a mult.i.tude of Trimbles behind them. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city's endless, inexplicable parade of suicides.

Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on his desk. From the bottom drawer he took his gun-cleaning equipment, then his .45. He began to take the gun apart.

The gun was old but serviceable. He'd never fired it except on the target range, and never expected to. To Trimble, cleaning his gun was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered off. Turn the screws, don't lose them. Lay the parts out in order.

Through the closed door to his office came the sounds of men hurrying. Another emergency? The department couldn't handle it all. Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men.

Gun oil. Oiled rag. Wipe each part. Put it back in place.

Why would a man like Ambrose Harmon go off a building?

In the early morning light he lay, more a stain than a man, thirty-six stories below the edge of his own penthouse roof. The pavement was splattered red for yards around him. The stairs were still wet. Harmon had landed on his face. He wore a bright silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sash.

Others would take samples of his blood, to learn if he had acted under the influence of alcohol or drugs. There was little to be learned from seeing him in his present condition.

"But why was he up so early?" Trimble wondered. For the call had come in at 8:03, just as Trimble arrived at headquarters.

"So late, you mean." Bentley had beaten him to the scene by twenty minutes. "We called some of his friends. He was at an all-night poker game. Broke up around six o'clock."

"Did Harmon lose?"

"Nope. He won almost five hundred bucks."

"That fits," Trimble said in disgust. "No suicide note?"

"Maybe they've found one. Shall we go up and see?"

"We won't find a note," Trimble predicted.

Even three months earlier Trimble would have thought, How incredible! or, Who could have pushed him? Now, riding up in the elevator, he thought only, Reporters. For Ambrose Harmon was news. Even among this past year's epidemic suicides, Ambrose Harmon's death would stand out like Lyndon Johnson in a lineup.

He was a prominent member of the community, a man of dead and wealthy grandparents. Perhaps the huge inheritance, four years ago, had gone to his head. He had invested tremendous sums to back harebrained, quixotic causes.

Now, because one of the harebrained causes had paid off, he was richer than ever. The Crosstime Corporation already held a score of patents on inventions imported from alternate time tracks. Already those inventions had started more than one industrial revolution. And Harmon was the money behind Crosstime. He would have been the world's next billionaire-had he not walked off his balcony.

They found a roomy, luxuriously furnished apartment in good order, and a bed turned down for the night. The only sign of disorder was the clothing-slacks, sweater, a silk turtleneck s.h.i.+rt, knee-length shoesocks, no underwear-piled on a chair in the bedroom. The toothbrush had been used.

He got ready for bed, Trimble thought. He brushed his teeth, and then he went out to look at the sunrise. A man who kept late hours like that, he wouldn't see the sunrise very often. He watched the sunrise, and when it was over he jumped.

Why?

They were all like that. Easy, spontaneous decisions. The victim/killers walked off bridges or stepped from their balconies or suddenly flung themselves in front of subway trains. They strolled halfway across a freeway, or swallowed a full bottle of laudanum. None of the methods showed previous planning. Whatever was used, the victim had had it all along; he never actually went out and bought a suicide weapon. The victim rarely dressed for the occasion, or used makeup, as an ordinary suicide would. Usually there was no note.

Harmon fit the pattern perfectly.

"Like Richard Cory," said Bentley.

"Who?"

"Richard Cory, the man who had everything. 'And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.' You know what I think?"

"If you've got an idea, let's have it."

"The suicides all started about a month after Crosstime got started. I think one of the Crosstime s.h.i.+ps brought back a new bug from some alternate timeline."

"A suicide bug?"

Bentley nodded.

"You're out of your mind."

"I don't think so. Gene, do you know how many Crosstime pilots have killed themselves in the last year? More than twenty percent!"

"Oh?"

"Look at the records. Crosstime has about twenty vehicles in action now, but in the past year they've employed sixty-two pilots. Three disappeared. Fifteen are dead, and all but two died by suicide."

"I didn't know that." Trimble was shaken.

"It was bound to happen sometime. Look at the alternate worlds they've found so far. The n.a.z.i world. The Red Chinese world, half bombed to death. The ones that are so totally bombed, that Crosstime can't even find out who did it. The one with the Black Plague mutation, and no penicillin until Crosstime came along. Sooner or later-"

"Maybe, maybe. I don't buy your bug, though. If the suicides are a new kind of plague, what about the other crimes?"

"Same bug."

"Uh uh. But I think we'll check up on Crosstime."

Trimble's hands finished with the gun and laid it on the desk. He was hardly aware of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a prodding sensation: the handle, the piece he needed to solve the puzzle.

He'd spent most of the day studying Crosstime, Inc. News stories, official handouts, personal interviews. The incredible suicide rate among Crosstime pilots could not be coincidence. He wondered why n.o.body had noticed it before.

It was slow going. With Crosstime travel, as with relativity, you had to throw away reason and use only logic. Trimble had sweated it out. Even the day's murders had not distracted him.

They were typical, of a piece with the preceding eight months' crime wave. A man had shot his foreman with a gun bought an hour earlier, then strolled off toward police headquarters. A woman had moved through the back row of a dark theater, using an ice pick to stab members of the audience through the backs of their seats. She had chosen only young men. They had killed without heat, without concealment; they had surrendered without fear or bravado. Perhaps it was another kind of suicide.

Time for coffee, Trimble thought, responding unconsciously to dry throat plus a muzziness in the mouth plus slight fatigue. He set his hands to stand up, and- The image came to him of an endless row of Trimbles, lined up like the repeated images in facing mirrors. But each image was slightly different. He would go get the coffee and he wouldn't and he would send somebody for it and someone was about to bring it without being asked. Some of the images were drinking coffee, a few had tea or milk, some were smoking, some were leaning too far back with their feet on the desks (and a handful of these were toppling helplessly backward), some were, like this present Trimble, introspecting with their elbows on the desk.

d.a.m.n Crosstime anyway.

He'd have had to check Harmon's business affairs, even without the Crosstime link. There might have been a motive there, for suicide or for murder, though it had never been likely.

In the first place, Harmon had cared nothing for money. The Crosstime group had been one of many. At the time that project had looked as harebrained as the rest: a handful of engineers and physicists and philosophers determined to prove that the theory of alternate time tracks was reality.

In the second place, Harmon had no business worries.